# Following the Flood *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 12 Mar 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Charles Dye *12 Mar 1998, 10:08* C R Culver writes: > Said Peter S: >> The part where he goes through Thrax holding the Claw aloft recalls `I am >> the light of the world' > This section is hard for me to interpret religiously, because Severian does > release the floodgates, killing the prisoners in the jacal [gaol?]. That is, > IMHO, not in any way Christlike. Er, killing them? Where do you get this? That chapter is titled "Following the Flood" and I've always seen it as a kind of play on the phrase "born again." Severian is being reborn from the torturers' guild -- literally exiting from confinement, head down through a tunnel, following a flood of water. His second birth should lead to a better life than the first; we get a specific mention of the water's cleansing effects. *Definitely* in the Christian tradition, for my money. > One interesting thing I did notice is Severian's reviving of Miles. The word > Miles is Latin for soldier (actually, it is nominative or accusative plural), > but it also can mean "thousand." How many people are in a Roman legion? A > thousand, or some variation of it? Of course, it's also a measure of distance; see Severian's own explanation for the name. And note that even Christ wasn't above the occasional name pun! raster at highfiber.com ---